Alan Turing’s Radio Broadcasts

In May and June of 1951, The BBC broadcast lectures by five leading figures of British computing: Douglas Hartree, Max Newman, Alan Turing, Frederic ("Freddie") Williams, and Maurice Wilkes. Of these men, Turing has become the most famous. On May 15th of that year, the BBC broadcast his  short lecture, a riveting 8-page steamroller titled "Can Computers Think?"

It is one of the earliest written works intended for the general public that directly addressed the future of AI. He had written much "heavier" thesis on the topic Ex. Intelligent Machinery (1948).  If you want to get into the deep end, pick up a copy of Mechanical Intelligence, Volume 1 Collected Works of A.M. Turing

Unfortunately the recordings made by the BBC of these broadcasts no longer exist. However, the Turing archives at King’s College, Cambridge do contain Turing’s original radio script. You can read that script here complete with hand corrections.  Recently writer and mathematician James Grime re-recorded them and posted the audio on Youtube to benefit us all. To Mr. Grime we give our thanks.

Marconi Station at Clifden Connemara and the IRA

I feel like Marconi get entirely too much credit for the birth of radio. Nonetheless I keep coming back to  particular parts of his story. Clifden like many others bears further examination.

After Marconi transmitted wireless messages from his station at Poldhu in Cornwall to Newfoundland on December 12th, 1901, he won a grant of $80,000 from the Canadian Government to build a station at Glace Bay in Nova Scotia.  So he moved his operation west... to Clifden in County Galway, Ireland, in the region of Connemara, located on the Owenglin River where it flows into Clifden Bay. It moved him over 300 miles closer to Canada. More here.

In 1907, the Daily Mail newspaper published a very graphic description of the station operations here. It's well worth reading. You can imagine the writer wearing protective goggles and standing there in the smoke with cotton in his ears bewildered at the machinery and the flashes of light expecting Marconi to do everything short of resurrecting the dead. I quote here at length because the language is truly amazing. James Joyce could hardly have done better.

"An entire room is given up to strange sheets of steel, which are hung from roof to floor, like washing on a line, until only narrow alleys are left. Queer brown earthenware jars, like old-fashioned receptacles, and all manner of outlandish electrical apparatus now confront the visitor. The plates are for acting as a reservoir to store electrical energy. The jars are transformers. The engineer gave a few directions to his assistant, who, seated before an ordinary Morse telegraph instrument in the operating room, placed a telephone headpiece to his ears, and began to fumble with the key, hastily bidding me to stuff cotton wool in my ears and don a pair of blue-glass spectacles. The engineer beckoned me to the connection room on the floor above, which is equipped with a medley of strange electrical contrivances.  The use of the cotton-wool and smoked glasses became at once startlingly apparent. From the 'interrupter' instrument corresponding exactly in duration to the assistant's touch of the key below, came three blinding flashes of blue-white flame, followed by a short flash, and then three more short flashes. The two side-mouths of the instrument likewise spout eye-blinding flame of the same colour and intensity. Simultaneously, the discharger, a few feet across the room, emitted similar blinding flames, and there came a wearing, tearing boom like the deep bass of some gigantic organ, but immeasurably cruder and louder. The duration of each note again corresponded exactly with the assistant's dot or dash on the instrument below. This was the electrical discharger, which sends oscillating electrical currents from the building into the aerial wires outside. These at once begin to set up vibrations of the ether, which in loops and waves travel with inconceivable rapidity across the sea."

The motivation here on the part of Canada was to break the submarine cable operators monopoly on transatlantic messaging. Marconi's commercial wireless service busted that monopoly. His first regular trans-Atlantic wireless service was established on October 17th, 1907 between Clifden, Ireland and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.  (An additional Marconi receiving station in Letterfrack, Ireland operated briefly from 1913 until 1917.)

Due to destruction caused by the Irish Civil War in 1922, traffic formerly carried at Clifden was permanently replaced via Marconi's new station at Ongar in Essex.  The first serious problems became in July.  On the night of Tuesday 25th, several buildings were set on fire and shots were fired. The receiving house was practically destroyed. There was also damage done to the condenser house. The staff were sent home. This wasn't an isolated incident; 14 homes had been burned in Clifden in 1921.

The station was never bought back into normal operation. The IRA irregulars held Clifden until August 15th, 1922 when they were forced out by the Irish Free State regular army. The last marconigram sent from Clifden, dated August 17, 1922. It announced the recapture of Clifden. The Clifden station then became a garrison for government troops. On November 29th the IRA took back the station only to be driven out again on December 9th. The contents of Clifden were sold for scrap to a Sheffield-based scrap merchant, Thos. W. Ward in 1925.

There's more info about this in the book Marconi: The Man Who Networked The World by Marc Raboy and also Richard Pine's book 2RN And The Origins Of Irish Radio.

News and Reviews 2017

It's been a shorter year for me blog-wise. There has been less research, less writing but so much going on elsewhere. However, when I have posted it's been longer, delved deeper and weirder unearthing some truly arcane deep dives. I'll keep it brief and focus on the highlights.

Best Posts:
I was perhaps overtly proud of my post on radio stations in Kerouac's novel On the Road. But for over a decade that's been the hard, immutable core of Arcane Radio Trivia: Obscure facts, wholly ancillary to the rest of the story.  As a fan of Samuel Beckett I was very pleased to finally write a lengthy post on his radio plays. I've been meaning to get to that for years. In Sixteen Sepia Spielers I write up an infamous 1947 Ebonmy magazine article I've used as a source a dozen times. I even wrote up the Jazz Man Radio show and had the pleasure of corresponding with the legendary Cary Ginell. I also quite liked by two-parter on Radio Free Paris back in April.

Most Popular Posts:
My most popular posts haven't changed in years.  Since 2009 the most traffic has gone to a post about Peter Tripp.  This is due to a completely coincidental link on Reddit. It was re-blogged by many others and remains an aberration in my web-traffic with 90k+ hits. I did eventually collate a list of all Radio Wake-a-thon records here. My 2007 post on the Career Academy of Famous Broadcasters continues to earn comments from it's legion of former students. It remains a top hit on Google. In third place a 2010 post on Barn Dance programs remains popular. My readers continue to debate if I was unfairly harsh to Kevin Metheny. I think not, but he died in 2014 so I have hopes that it's over.

Best Radio Station:
This year I've listened to two stations more than any others 88.3 WMTS and 88.3 WBGO. It's taught me three things.
   1. I am not as discriminating about jazz as I thought I was.
   2. I passionately hate jazz vocals
   3. I am far too snobby about my noise rock.
I can actually listen to WBGO at length alternately enjoying and/or despising songs or even segments of songs depending on if and when the tin pan alley, show tune vocal begins. (Jazz vocals are a vestigial organ of the jazz genre and can be amputated without harm in almost every case.) By comparison, WMTS has a very solid schedule of innovative programs, including some abrasive and noisy gems. I also have spent a lot of time streaming Under Noise, and KUPS. For all of the above, I can thank the TuneIn App on my Roku.

Best Radio Show: 
I am very taken this Fall with a mid-day program on 91.7 KVRX, I Give a Heck. This  They describe themselves as follows "Fidel Cashflow and newly enthusiastic A Shramp Named Karl will be bringing you the best of post-punk, and noise rock, the weird of the weird. Two weird dudes playing weird tunes."  It's accurate but their taste in punk, noise punk and prog-punk is bar-none. Also digging lately Mystery Train on WRUR, The premium Psychedelia on Dementia 13 at CIUT, Dot Dash at WRAS, the long-running Dare Waves on WRUW, and some back to back shows on CJSR on Monday nights: Vlad Thee Inhaler's Sci-Fi BBQ, Basement Bricolage, and Imaginary Landscapes. Vlad  piques your curiosity then melts your brain, then for the next 4 hours you hallucinate local music and the RCMP asks for your passport.

Best Record Store:  
True vinyl loyalists, Mr. Suit Records has have helped me score some white whales, and a number of other rarities just because that how they roll. They've got a good stock of the news, and a nice  selection of the old. Mike, the man behind the counter is a frequent instagrammer of new arrivals. The most common response is "Hold please" to which he always responds "You got it" and thus becomes an enabler of pickers, record hoarders, and archivists alike.

Best Zine:
Women in Sound is a quarterly print zine dedicated to showcasing the achievements and process of women and non-binary people in live and recorded sound. It fills such an obvious niche in the pantheon of 'zines it's hard to believe it didn't already exist.

Top 10 Records of 2018

1. Unsane - Sterilize
2. Idles -  Brutalism
3. '68 - Two Parts Viper
4. Pile - A Hairshirt of Purpose
5. Glassjaw - Material Control
6. Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent
7. Ecstatic Vision - Raw Rock Fury
8. Lung - Bottom of the Barrel
9. Metz - Strange Peace
10. Buck Gooter - 100 Bells

Runner ups...
Nomad Mountain Outlaws - Raccoon Church, Trash Knife - 7", Miscalculations - Kill The Whole Cast, Blessed - II, Skáphe – Untitled, Aye Nako - Silver Haze, Hilltop Gamblers - Midrash, Code Orange - Forever, Spoon - Hot Thoughts, Alter - Pendulum, Algiers - The Underside of Power, Converge - The Dusk In Us, Pissed Jeans - Why Love Now, Cousin Boneless - Revel in the Rubble

WBAI Print Ad

I keep posting these, pointing out how rare it is to see a radio station advertise in a print publication. I think in a decade I've found less than a dozen.

Voice of Oromo Liberation Radio

The Oromo Liberation Front was founded in 1973 by Oromo nationalists to promote self-determination for their people. The Oromo people are an ethnic group that are mostly found in Ethiopia but also parts of Kenya and Somalia. This is no splinter group. There are 35 million Oromo people in Ethiopia alone, constituting that nations largest ethnic group.  The OLF operates a shortwave radio station, SBO (Sagalee Bilisummaa Oromoo) or VOL (Voice of Oromo Liberation), in Berlin.

Let's talk a little history. The nation of Ethiopia grew out of lands controlled at different times by the the Kingdom of Aksum, the Aussa Sultanate, Zagwe dynasty, Mudaito Dynasty, the Yejju Oromo dynasty, and the Giyorgis II Empire all before 1890. Europeans looked at the whole horn of African and called it Abyssinia starting around 600 ACE. This becomes more of a problem later.

It was Emperor Dagmawi Menelik II that formed a country resembling modern Ethiopia starting around 1889. Menelik was of Oromo ancestry as was Gugsa of Yejju. Menelik did much in the way of modernization. He was big on road construction, electricity and education and a system of central taxation. He also founded their new capital of Addis Ababa, the new capital of Abyssinia. Abyssinia?  Yes, Menelik advertised that he was Abyssinian, and descended directly from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. (This is despite the fact that there is no historical evidence for a Queen of Sheba existing contemporary to Solomon.) For more information check out A History of Ethiopia by Harold G. Marcus.

This is probably the key point of understanding as to why this radio station exists. The OLF do not consider the Oromo to be Abyssinian. The OLF believe the Oromo are the original inhabitants of "Oromia" and that the Abyssinians are colonialists no different than Italy was in WWII. Despite the historical accounts they believe Yohannes and Menilek were also Abyssinians. The OLF claim, dubious as it is, sets the stage for the Oromo and the Abyssinians to be defined as separate ethnic groups. With that in mind, lets fast forward to the 1900s.

Haile Selassie I, who ruled starting in 1916 didn't squelch this conflict. Selassie was also Oromo and under his reign the Italian colonialists returned.  But Selassie did found the nations first radio station in 1941. He broadcast from Addis Ababa in 1935 looking for help with those aforementioned Italian fascists. The British fought alongside Ethiopians and drove Franco back to his boot-shaped peninsula. Selassie's station returned to the air as Radio Addis Abeba in 1941 using an EIAR (Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche) transmitter on 9620 kc with regular broadcasts in Arabic, Amharic and English. Radio Guide magazine recorded that they signed on May 9th, 1938 which is later than most accounts. In the 1950s the Imperial guard began broadcasting as well.

Ethiopia didn't exit WWII well. Across the border in Eritrea, the Italians built a transmitter called Kagnew station and the Americans took it in 1942, they renamed it Radio Marina. The USA supplied more transmitters in the 1960s, installing one in Harrar, another on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, and a 50 kW 40 miles south of Asmara actually inside Eritrea.  That Asmara transmitter had to operate at low power to avoid interference with Kagnew station. At this time AFRTS was transmitting from Kagnew.

In 1943, Radio Mogadishu was built in Somalia at the same time as Radio Djibouti, both broadcasting in Somali. They both became pro-independence outlets when Ethiopia invaded Somalia. Russia instigated some of this selectively sending aid to pro-communist governments in the region. The Derg, a Communist military junta governed Ethiopia, from 1977 to 1987. The Oromo liked The Derg even less than Selassie. The Derg was replaced by the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, which was overthrown in 1991 by the EPRDF (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front,) which has been the ruling political coalition ever since.

In Modern Ethiopia there are four political parties one of which is the Oromo Peoples' Democratic Organization. But the The EPRDF opposes liberal democracy, liberalism in general, and views free market capitalism as decadent. The party still owes much to the ideologies of Mao which were not media-friendly. So while having some Oromo membership, the OLF feels understandably unsatisfied. The Ethiopian government considers them a terrorist group. Nonetheless, the OLF has offices in Washington, D.C. and Berlin and is a member of the UNPO (Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization.)

In Ethiopia there are presently ten radio broadcast stations, eight AM and two shortwave. The most popular of these are Radio Ethiopia, Radio Fana, Radio Voice of One Free Ethiopia, and the Voice of the Revolution of Tigray. None of these stations broadcast in Oromo language. The OLF began operating a shortwave radio station, SBO (Sagalee Bilisummaa Oromoo) or VOL (Voice of Oromo Liberation), in Berlin in 1996. SBO is on the air six days a week on 9,485 KHz.